


The Way That The Story Ends

by thecryoftheseagulls



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst and Feels, Canon Compliant, Fix-It, I wrote this to process my feelings about the end of s8, Keith/Shiro's Clone, M/M, Post-Canon, Rating May Change, Shiro (Voltron) Has a Clone, The Original Shiro is With Curtis, back to our regularly scheduled pretending the final season never happened at 11, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-03-27
Packaged: 2019-10-05 22:41:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17333756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecryoftheseagulls/pseuds/thecryoftheseagulls
Summary: A single Shiro clone survives the destruction of the cloning facility.Years later, Keith is on a routine Blade of Marmora aid mission to a backwater planet just outside the remains of the old Galra empire. He’s never been to this system before. So why does his host’s favorite pilot -- a tall, masked humanoid simply called Quiet -- seem so familiar?





	1. Birth

Shiro wakes to light and heat and pressure, the screech of collapsing metal ringing in his ears. Burning…everything is burning around him. He falls forward, unsupported, lands heavily on hands and knees, scraping skin from his palms and fabric from the skintight undersuit he's wearing. Something creaks and groans above him; Shiro feels a breeze in his hair and thinks _move_ and he does, rolling clumsily to the side as a support beam of some sort crashes where he'd been seconds before. He coughs, ash and smoke in his lungs because the entire deck of -- wherever he is -- is on _fire_ , but there's a sickly bittersweet taste in his mouth and down the back of his throat too, and he doesn't know what it is but he doesn't like it.

He pushes himself up to his hands and knees again, with effort, his muscles shaking at the simple task. Eventually he sits up and crouches back on his heels; he can't stay here but his body is so slow to respond.

Then Keith's voice rises above the crackle of the flames and the crashes as the platform Shiro is standing on starts breaking apart.

He says, “Shiro...please. You're my brother. I _love_ you,” and his voice cracks and Shiro breathes,

“ _Keith_.” He pushes himself to his feet, a Herculean effort, but he makes it up only to stumble backwards when the surface under his feet tilts sideways, tripping over the beam that just fell and slamming into something behind him. It must be partially hollow, because his feet connect with something solid a foot before his shoulder slams into metal so hot it melts the undersuit from his skin. He gasps and cries out, jerking forward and tripping over his feet to get away from the heat. He rights himself and looks behind him. The thing is a pod, almost Altean in design but not quite, and it's only one in a long line of them, and they're all burning, glass shattered and metal melting and bodies, oh god, there are bodies inside of all of them, except the one Shiro stumbled into.

“No,” Shiro wheezes. His Galra arm lights up and he rends the sides of the closest apart and reaches inside, but the man inside the pod is definitely dead, flesh charred so badly his features are obscured.

Shiro stumbles down the line of pods, bracing himself with his Galra arm against the sides of them so that he won't lose his feet as the metal under them creaks and dips, but they're all the same, body after body horribly burned, and no one is alive. But then Shiro makes it to the end and there are two pods there which look like they avoided the worst of the blast that did this, because the pods are mostly intact. Shiro punches through the first; its occupant is burned badly from the residual heat of the pod next to him, skin blistered and red and angry but he might still be alive, he might -- Shiro feels for a pulse and finds none and says, “God, please, c'mon,” and the air in his nose is blistering, smelling like hot metal and blood and burned flesh and seared hair and he wants to vomit but Keith's here, somewhere, Keith is here, and if Shiro can save even one--

He slams his shoulder into the last pod as the ground dips again under his feet, clings to the pod with his metal hand.

“Please,” Shiro begs, looking up at the face of the man inside as he rips the pod's door away and

The face on the man inside the pod is Shiro's.

He's burned too, but not as badly. The shape of his face and the white shock of hair at his forehead are recognizable and distinct.

The man in the pod has a metal arm too.

Shiro reaches for his own face with a shaking hand, touches his neck to feel for a pulse but the Shiro inside the pod doesn't move, isn't breathing.

He has no heartbeat either.

“Fuck,” Shiro says, pulling his hand back in a fist and pressing it against his mouth.

Every pod in this line has had a man of the same size, Shiro's size, in it, except the empty one on the end. The pod Shiro _fell out of_. He looks down at his body and recognizes the bodysuit he's wearing as the same bodysuit every body in every pod is wearing. He looks away and there are _more_ , multiple levels and multiple rows of pods, and all of them contain a body of the same size, and _all of them are burning_.

He bends at the waist, hands on his knees, and vomits, acid burning the back of his throat as the contents of his stomach come back up. The taste is sickly sweet under it all, thick in his mouth and on the ground like spoiled milk, and Shiro pukes again and again as flames lick at the pods lined up around him and the platform under his feet creaks ominously.

He pushes himself up straight, because he's going to die here like the rest of the others if he doesn't move, and he runs, weak-kneed and hollow-eyed, towards the stone that this station is anchored to. There's a staircase not yet blocked; he takes the steps two at a time, pushing his body beyond the limits of its current weakness.

Metal shrieks again; Shiro has to grab at the thin metal railing to keep himself from pitching over the edge into empty space as the platform tilts and part of it, below and beside where Shiro stands, begins to fall away.

Shiro wraps his arms and then his legs around the railing until he can pull himself up and over the edge of the stairs tipped on their sides; a flash of gray in his peripheral vision makes him turn his head in time to see a body, shaped like his with a tuft of white hair amidst black but wearing the armor of a paladin of Voltron, fall past. Another body follows it, smaller, sinks a blade into the surface of the stone and grabs for the hand of the falling Shiro, the real Shiro.

“Keith,” Shiro gasps, but he can barely pull himself over the ledge of the railing and straddle it to keep from falling. There's no way down to where Keith and the true Shiro are, no way to reach them or save them, and Shiro can only watch, helpless, dangling mere inches above his own certain death, as Keith's blade slips where it's wedged into stone; he can see, just barely, the way Keith looks down at the man he's holding onto and Shiro can't make out his expression but surely it echoes his own, the horror and powerlessness of watching as you know you can do nothing to save the most important person in your life. Then they fall, Keith and the man he clings to, together, and Shiro screams and screams and screams Keith's name but there's no one to hear him above the sound of everything falling to pieces around him.

They fall, lit by the explosions of the facility behind them, star-crossed lovers tipping into the vastness of open space, and Shiro waits above them for the place of his creation to become the place also of his death, a long, crystalline moment where the heat and the stench and the horror of it all is almost lovely.

It doesn't end like this, of course.

The Black Lion appears, opens its maw wide and plucks Keith and the true Shiro from their plummet; Shiro -- well, he's not Shiro, is he, he's just Another, just A Spare -- he claws his way up the remains of the stairs, up into the structures higher on the rock, finds a dusty emergency shuttle to power up and take him away from here.

But that they Live, that they Escape, that they Go On -- these are all afterthoughts.

The story of that day is that once, a man awoke amidst fire and destruction. He could not save any others from the flames; he could barely save himself. He watched the man he loved and yet did not know fall, and he waited for death, but death did not come.

Because this was birth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so I am working on all my other sheith projects (with a slight priority for We're Giants, because that one is the furthest along), but I needed to write this story for myself. It's catharsis, I think, for the way canon ended -- I needed to see a way for that epilogue to mean Keith is, actually, truly happy, and loved, and appreciated for his devotion. I have every intention of pretending the entire 8th season never happened after I've written this -- I need a better ending for Allura, for Shiro, for Lance, for Keith, for everyone. But this story? This one's just for Keith. And it's gotten a little out of hand honestly; I write very slowly, so as usual there won't be a set update schedule, but this will be a series with two planned parts.
> 
> If y'all want to follow me elsewhere, I'm mostly on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/cryofseagulls) these days.


	2. Quiet

The shuttle barely makes it to the closest planet. It doesn’t survive reentry.

The planet itself is well under Galra control, and he has no title of “Champion” to give him clout with these people, because he is not Shiro. The arm is still deadly, though, and the scars on his face, on his body, from fights he never actually participated in, are still real. 

The first person to try to mug him in a dark alley for money he does not have ends up with several broken ribs and a shattered femur.

It's raining. He steps out of the alley and catches sight of his face in the reflected glass of a nearby pawn shop. There's blood on his lip, on the knuckles of his flesh hand, a slight swelling to his left cheekbone that will soon be a bruise. The face that looks back at him beneath the blood -- black hair with a shock of white right over his forehead, sharp cheekbones, a strong jaw -- does not belong to him.

At least he doesn't have a scar across his nose. They took his arm and did something to his hair to make it look the same as Shiro's, but apparently they hadn't gotten around to scarring him, yet. It doesn't make the tight feeling in his chest go away, doesn't make him feel less like an interloper in his own body, but it does give him something that makes his face different enough that he can breathe. A little.

He bends down, tugs off the red scarf his unconscious mugger is wearing, and ties it around the bottom of his face like a mask.

He doesn't take the mask off, not when he finds himself a corner behind an old dumpster where he can flip the lid back to give him a little relief from the rain while he gets some sleep, not when he bums an under-the-table job down at the port loading freight the next day, not when he goes into a tiny secondhand shop with his first day's pay and buys a jacket to go over his undersuit.

He tugs down the mask to eat and drink what little he can buy with the last of his pay, and then he tugs it back up. 

Each day, he buys a meal and an article of clothing with the pay he gets, until eventually his teeth don't chatter so much at night and he no longer looks like someone's escaped science experiment in a onesie.

Twice more, he’s mugged on the street. He breaks one guy's arm and the other guy's nose. People mostly leave him alone after that. 

It rains a lot.

Then, around the docks, whispers start about the big explosion a few systems over. The rumors get louder over the days -- a couple planets, uninhabited ones, got incinerated. Maybe the Emperor was there. Maybe Emperor Lotor is dead. One of the locals, an old guy with one eye, says that there was a lot of quintessence disturbance when it all went down, like he's sensitive enough to these things he can just sense them from systems away, and everybody on the docks takes this as gospel. 

He didn't think quintessence even worked like that, but what does he know, really. 

The rumors say Voltron was there. That Voltron fought Lotor. That Voltron fought with Lotor. That Voltron caused the explosion. 

There’s news about refugees from the planets nearby, but no news of Lotor or the Paladins of Voltron. The port starts filling up with Galra military ships, on their way to scout the system for information about their Emperor.

Days pass. No news comes of Lotor or Voltron.

His boss and the other dockworkers figure out he can pilot one day when he has to move a mid-sized cargo ship out of the way so an incoming freighter can land. The cargo ship’s pilot is nowhere to be found, so his boss tells him to move the ship out of the way. It nearly goes bad when some hotshot Galra officer in a tiny fighter comes zipping in, between the cargo ship and the big freighter. He has to swerve to avoid hitting the fighter. It’s tight; most pilots, especially inexperienced ones, would have clipped their wings on either the fighter or the freighter, probably damaging one or two of the ships in the meantime. But he manages it easily enough, zips right over the hull of the freighter before anybody can collide with anybody else, and sets his cargo ship down gracefully elsewhere.

His handling of the situation earns him some impressed stares and a clap on the shoulder from his boss. He twitches, and thanks his mask again that he doesn’t have to force a smile, because no one can see his face.

Then a couple weeks later, the piloting thing earns him a place on one of those ships heading for the wreckage of the explosion.

“You want somebody that’s good for backbreaking labor and can pilot in a pinch, you want Quiet,” he overhears his boss telling the captain of a small vessel that’s been in and out of the port a couple times recently. She’s been making money doing supply runs to both the Galra soldiers and the local refugees on the outskirts of the explosion’s radius. 

“Quiet, huh,” the captain says. She flicks all three eyes towards him, gives him a quick glance-over.

His boss makes the chuuing sound that he’s come to recognize as this planet’s equivalent of a shrug.

“He gets the job done,” his boss says.

He feels it settle over him, the nickname the other dockworkers have been calling him. He hasn’t called them on it, because sometimes you just need a name you can yell across a shipyard when there’s work to be done. It’s… not really a name, it’s a descriptor. But it’s not inaccurate. He doesn’t talk much, to his boss or his coworkers or the people at the shops. He’s just… that guy, the one with the metal arm and the mask on his face. The quiet one.

He rolls his shoulders. It’ll do.

“All right,” the captain says. “That’s good enough for me.”

Quiet stands there, in the rain on the docks of this tiny planet, wearing a mask over his stolen face and a secondhand jacket with some kind of fur at the collar that makes him always smell like a wet sheepdog, and accepts the armband with the passcode to a ship that’s his way out of this place. He’s got nothing but the clothes on his back and the bit of money he’s saved so far. But they say Voltron is still missing, and that means Keith is missing, and Quiet may not be Shiro, but he’s got enough of Shiro in him that he’ll be damned if he does nothing when Keith might need him.

He spends the last of his money on a real mask, a hard black one that fits over his whole face, and then Quiet boards his new employer’s ship and doesn’t look back.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm over on [twitter](https://twitter.com/cryofseagulls) these days if y'all are interested


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